Native apps vs Cross Platform Apps (Hybrids)

People love using Smartphone’s due to the fact that things they accomplish with it are numerous within a short period of time. Users can now do interesting activities like social networking, watching videos, reading emails, playing games and other numerous activities. Truth be told, the major reason why we love Smartphones is because they make our day to day life fun-filled and interesting. So if you are thinking of developing an app for the application market, you have to make a decision on whether to develop a native app or a hybrid app.

The Question is now WHICH IS THE BEST?

Native over Hybrid

Developing native apps literarily mean that you are using the native language of the platform, Building Objective-C on iOS, and Java on Android. The major merit of native apps is their performance as they are compiled into machine code which would render the best performance in which you can get from the mobile phone.

Going Native

If you are a newbie when it comes to mobile development and you want to develop mobile apps or take advantage of the native APIs, then you would need a good tutorial on learning mobile native development.

For example, to be a native iOS developer would require you getting yourself a Mac as it is needed to develop the code into an app. So if you are developing an app for each platform you need to have 2 separate code bases and potentially more expensive also. On the other hand, certain things can only be done with native code such as graphics intensive operation, complex calculations, real time apps or highly responsive interfaced.

Hybrid over Native

Hybrid apps are web applications in the native browser, such as UIWebView in iOS and WebView in Android. HTML, CSS and JavaScript are used in developing Hybrid apps and are then embedded in a native app. This makes you use any framework which you want. Hybrid apps use web technologies, therefore a web developer with some training can start developing for hybrid platforms, the same developer can work on multiple versions of the same app using the same code base, thus decreasing the cost of development and maintenance.

Hybrid app development is simpler and faster thereby making the application maintainability easier. In addition to this, you can change platforms anytime too.

The major problem which hybrid apps have is that they largely depend on the native browser meaning that native apps are still faster than them.

Going Hybrid

As a hybrid app developer, you should be aware that there are two main competitors in this field which are Cordova and Appcelerator Titanium. When developing with Cordova, it looks just like creating a webpage as you can create HTML, CSS and JavaScript local files, test them and wrap them in native web view.

Conclusion

Native and hybrid apps help in fulfilling different needs of developers and we cannot say that one is the best as they have their merit and demerits so the decision is up to you to choose which is going to be the best fit for the application you want to develop.